“The most difficult thing for me to accept,” the old sackmaster is saying a day after being loosed into the wind by the Calgary Stampeders, “is knowing in my heart that I can still play at a high level, I can still help a team. If I didn’t, I’d let go. Walk away. But the work I put in last season to get back to here, to now . . .

“I was getting back to my old self as far as being able to run and rush the passer, being healthy. I didn’t have any fall-off in my game when I was watching film. Watch the film, I’m there on a lot of plays, especially in that second pre-season game.

“It’s just . . . hard. Last year, literally I was in the NFL. And now I’m released in the CFL? So, yeah, difficult to accept; to wrap my head around. For sure. For sure.”

It’s simply impossible not to take an immediate shine to Stevie Baggs, be won over by that sunny disposition, the easy familiarity he has with even passing acquaintances, his conspiratorial wink/tongue-in-cheek bravado, the precocious kid eager to please.

Shakespeare, he once nicknamed himself in tribute to his apparently endless capacity for quotable material. And, with all deference to the Bard, in a screwy kind of way, the handle fit.

Well, then, the title of the last act of this play? Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Stevie Baggs finds himself, for the moment, out of football; in search of work, of a team, less than week from kickoff.

At loose ends.

“I mean, it’s unfortunate,” agreed Stamps’ dominating rush end Charleston Hughes. “These types of decisions are hard, all the way across the board. We’ve got a lot of great players on this team — young and old. It’s football. The nature of the business. Stevie, I’m sure, without question, he will be playing somewhere else. Soon.”

In the final analysis Baggs was deemed surplus requirements here along the defensive line by the play of ex-Eskimo Shawn Lemon, a protege, of sorts, and second-year man Cordarro Law.

When Baggs arrived in early September of 2012, he was already at a disadvantage, endeavouring to work himself back from a pulled quad muscle sustained during the Baltimore Ravens’ training camp. But he hung around, stayed visible, put in an in unseemly amount of hours during the off-season in order to be ready for this training camp and the opportunity to cut loose and cause unbridled havoc in red and white.

And now it’s all come tumbling down around him.

“In my young coaching career, one of the two toughest discussions I’ve had,” acknowledged Claybrooks, himself not so far removed from being the veteran campaigner approaching closing credits. “Kevin Dixon being the other. To see a guy like Stevie come in and work as hard as he did to get back to good playing form . . . but at the end of the day you have to do what’s best for the team, the organization, the group.

“We believe here that we play the best players. That’s how we’ve been able to win. It’s not about political choices or sentimental ones. It’s not as if we had a plan formulated. It was pretty open coming into camp. Huff always says ‘The field dictates who plays.’ And that’s what we live by. You can’t deny what these young guys are doing out there.

“And you reward them by playing them.”

John Hufnagel could only wish Baggs well.

“It’s not about what he didn’t do,” the boss emphasized, “but what the other guys did. It was a numbers game. It was a very, very close competition. It’s just the way it falls.

“It wasn’t fun (delivering the news). For either party.”

Baggs plans on sticking around a short while, a week or two, on Hufnagel’s advice, just to see what happens around the league, if a spot opens up on the D-line in any of the seven other cities. One thing in his favour: He certainly doesn’t lack for profile.

“I know when I leave football, from a business perspective I’ll be fine,” he said. “I guess for me, that’s the biggest question right now — Do I leave? As far as being that veteran guy who’s released, well, people can still look at the film and say ‘That guy still has it. Why would they let him go?’

“The outpouring of calls I received from guys after this happened — Jon Cornish, Larry Taylor, Corey Mace, Charleston Hughes, Keon Raymond — telling me they were surprised and urging me to keep my head up has been amazing. I’m so thankful.

“I don’t want to give the game up at this point. I still have the passion to play.”

What’s galling now, as he wrestles with cold, bloodless reality of the situation, is that he won’t be playing here.

“You know,” said Stevie Baggs, “I haven’t been around Calgary that long, but I already have a lot of love for this organization and this city. I felt at home. I really did want to be part of it.

“What bothers me most is that I didn’t get the chance to be at my best, to show the fans here what a healthy Stevie Baggs can do. That’s the tough part.”

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Johnson: Former CFL star Baggs ‘shocked’ after being among late cuts on Stampeders

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